Sunday, July 16, 2017

Two contrasting views of Liu Xiaobo

The 61-year-old Liu, a former literary critic and high-profile champion of human rights and non-violent resistance, spent the last eight years of his life behind bars on trumped-up charges of “subversion.” His real offense was to call for democracy in China.

Minxin Pei | Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College, non-resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and author of China's Crony Capitalism.

For what my views are worth – which is very little, especially in China - I am always for freedom of speech.

That said, it’s worth clarifying that the late Liu Xiaobo was much more a Western nationalist than a genuine humans right activist.…(Liu quotes follow showing this.)His closest equivalent in Russia would probably be someone like Valeria Novodvorskaya, authoritarian neocon “liberals” who in net terms set back the cause of liberalism and human rights rather than advance them because of the negative reactions their Western cargo cultism and photo ops with John McCain provokes amongst the patriotic toiling masses....Contra Alt Right rhetoric, China is one of the least nationalist entities on the planet. What other country legally restricted the birth rates of its indigenous majority while letting minorities have second and third children to their hearts’ content? Even Sweden has yet to “cuck” itself that hard.

Netizens on the Chinese Internet constantly lambast the PRC for its limp-wristedness in responding to foreign provocations.

However, not even all this was enough for Liu Xiaobo. So far as he was concerned, only unequal treaties, only hardcore.